A trip to remember: Vallendar - Hastings and back... · 2. August 2010

Die folgenden Texte wurden von den Schülerinnen der Klasse 10c geschrieben, die an der Englandfahrt Ende Mai/ Anfang Juni teilgenommen haben. Wir übernehmen keine Haftung für die sprachliche und inhaltliche Richtigkeit, sind uns aber sicher, dass Sie bei der Lektüre viel Spaß haben werden (vorausgesetzt, Sie sind des Englischen mächtig…) (Red.)

Saturday, May 29th:

Today we went to the meeting place at the harbour of Hastings.

Here we got a paper with many questions about Hastings, but not all of them were to be answered, because the organisation hadn’t updated the questionnaire recently. Then we started the “do it yourself guided tour”. We saw many interesting things in the town like little streets with second-hand shops (we stopped our tour for some minutes to look at the merchandise there), the typical red phone- and post-boxes which are like the brand labels of England, benches with romantic memories of some special people who sat there and a very old post office which doesn’t exist anymore, for example. Then (when a bloody rain started to pour down on us) we went to the top of one of the hills behind the city (there was a lot of trouble because not everyone know WHICH of the two hills we had to climb on). Because of the rain we ran for shelter in a café, but the churlish waiter booted us out into the very wet storm. Then, when our teachers Mr. Bleyenberg and Ms. Derenthal arrived we visited the smuggler caves which are around 20 meters below the ground. They told us that many years ago especially tea and tobacco were smuggled into the caves, because of high taxes but when the smuggle was finished by soldiers and guards the empty caves became a home for many people in the second world war. We finished the tour trough the caves very early so we had more time to go through Hasting in little groups again. Some of us visited the whoopee and took a ride on one of the horizontal rotating table. We met each other again at the bus down by the beach whose driver Pascal brought us home to the guest families.

Sunday, May 30th:

On Sunday morning, we went to London at 9 o’clock by bus and travelled two and a half hours until we arrived at the O²-Arena. After using the toilet, we went to Westminster by the underground train. When we were there we walked past Big Ben over the Westminster Bridge to London Eye, but we couldn’t use our fast track tickets, so we would have had to wait three hours, if we wanted to ride the big wheel.

Our teachers told us that we could either wait or visit London for ourselves in little groups.
We decided to visit the different sights like Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Green Park, Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street. The whole group had to meet again at quarter to five p.m. at St. Paul Cathedral. Then we went to see the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge.

Many girls bought a “I LOVE LONDON” – pullover and sang some songs in front of the Tower. Then we went back to the O2- Arena, where our bus was waiting. There we saw the limousine of Lady Gaga, who performed there and then we drove back to Hastings and our host families.

Monday, May 31st:

At 9 a.m., our excursion to Leeds Castle, which was once inhabited by six mediaeval queens, started in Hastings. At 10 a.m. we arrived in Kent and went to see the “world’s nicest” castle. With our audio-guides we learned lots of things about the life of Lady Bailey, who lived in this lovely palace. Later it had been in private ownership. It has been used as a garrison, a prison and a convalescent home.

Sadly, we hadn’t enough time to discover everything because we had to leave at 12 p.m. to go to Royal Tunbridge Wells where we had free time. Some of our group went shopping and the others, the “elite” (16 students) started singing on the street and earned ?36. It was fun!

Even if some of our teachers were understandably embarrassed about the “elite”.
After three hours we took the bus to go to the All Saints Church in Tudeley. A friendly lady told us stories about the windows made by Chagall.

Every window has its own story: For example the window on the East which is the biggest and reminds people of Sara, who drowned after her 21th birthday. She loved the works of Chagall and that’s why her parents assigned him to create a window for Sara.
The speciality of the church is, that it’s the only church in the world, which has all its windows made by Chagall.

After the presentation, we donated the money we had earned by singing to the church and drove back to Hastings.
Some of us went to other families or to the seaside. At 9 p.m., we had to be home in our host-families.

Tuesday, June 1st:

We started this day early in the morning. The day begun with a visit of the Royal Pavillon in Brighton. This special museum includes a huge collection of original pieces from the 18th century and an exotic Tearoom where we enjoyed our first typical English cream tea with scones. In an audio guided tour, we learnt a lot about asian-like architecture, furniture and art owned by Prince Regent.
For lunch we went into the beautiful historic city centre. Brighton has an amazing architecture influenced by the old fishing traditions. We especially loved the road network called “The Lanes”. It’s a net of lovely alleyways with little tourist shops, fashion boutiques and funky coffee houses.
In the afternoon we visited the Beachy Head. Even in the cold wind and with rainy weather, we were amazed by the natural beauty of these white cliffs. It was always a pretty good possibility for taking pictures of the typical English weather.

In summary it was a day full of experiences and fun.